State Department and Western media ignore ‘the end of Christianity’ in Iraq

In December 2008 the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released its Report of the United States Commission on Religious Freedom on Iraq (PDF).

The report recommended that Iraq be designated as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) because of its “ongoing severe abuses of religious freedom and based on the Iraqi government’s toleration of these abuses as described in this report, particularly abuses against all of Iraq’s most vulnerable and smallest religious minorities.”

It continues:

“there has been continued targeted violence, as well as threats and intimidation against persons belonging to religious minorities, and other egregious religiously-motivated abuses are continuing and widespread. The lack of effective government action to protect these communities from abuses has established Iraq among the most dangerous places on earth for religious minorities.”

The situation is “especially dire” for ChaldoAssyrian Christians, other Christians, Sabean Mandaeans, and Yazidis.

”These communities report that their numbers in Iraq have substantially diminished, and that their members who have left the country have not to date showed signs of returning in significant numbers,” the report said. “Legally, politically, and economically marginalized, these small minorities are caught in the middle of a struggle between the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and the central Iraqi government for control of northern areas where their communities are concentrated. The combined effect of all of this has been to endanger these ancient communities’ very existence in Iraq.”

The report itself catalogues the depopulation of religious minorities in Iraq. From page 14:

”In 2003, there were estimated to be as many as 1.4 million Christians in Iraq, including Chaldean Catholics, Assyrian Orthodox, Assyrian Church of the East, Syriac Orthodox, Armenians (Catholic and Orthodox), Protestants, and Evangelicals. Today, it is thought that only 500,000 to 700,000 indigenous Christians remain in the country. Moreover, while Christians and other religious minorities represented only approximately three percent of the pre-2003 Iraqi population, they constitute approximately 15 and 20 percent of registered Iraqi refugees in Jordan and Syria, respectively, and Christians account for 35 and 64 percent, respectively, of all registered Iraqi refugees in Lebanon and Turkey. Christian leaders have warned that the result of this flight may be ‘the end of Christianity in Iraq.’

“The most recent attacks took place in the northern city of Mosul in late September/early October 2008, when at least 14 Christians were killed and many more report they were threatened, spurring some 13,000 individuals to flee to villages east and north of the city and an estimated 400 families to flee to Syria. The United Nations has estimated that this number is half of the current Christian population in Mosul.”

In the last days of the Bush Administration, the U.S. State Department declined to deem Iraq a CPC, Catholic News Agency reports. That's pragmatism in inaction.

If Iraq is still a U.S. responsibility, it’s hard to tell from observing the media’s December coverage of the USCIRF report.

The story merited less than 140 words in the Washington Post, which placed it on page B09 under its “Religion Briefing.” The Post followed a Reuters story given more space at Radio Free Europe.

A brief search of the New York Times site reveals no recent stories specifically on religious freedom in Iraq, the USCIRF reports apparently being last mentioned in September 2007.

Perhaps the press had more important religion reporting to do in December 2008, like reprinting frenzied complaints about Pope Benedict’s tangential criticism of gender theory.

Who does Google News suggest is providing the most coverage of USCIRF action on Iraq?

The Assyrian International News Agency, which published its USCIRF report summary in December.

AINA also reported that Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) in December accused the U.S. of turning a blind eye to anti-Christian persecutions in Iraq. AINA further reported that Sens. Brownback, Casey, Wicker, Cardin and Levin had sent a March 5 letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton which reiterated portions of the USCIRF report.

This letter was not even announced on any of the Senators’ web sites. Friends of long-suffering Iraqi Christians should not have to ask for that token publicity.

There is a backstory to the religious freedom commission, again covered mainly in the religious press. The Associated Baptist Press in May 2008 blamed political division in the USCIRF’s failure to secure an initial recommendation on Iraq’s CPC status, reporting:

The 10-member panel has nine voting members. Of those presently serving, five commissioners were appointed by Republicans, and four by Democrats. According to the Sun, all Democrat-appointed commissioners supported elevating Iraq to CPC status this year, while most Republican-appointed commissioners opposed the designation and the report accompanying it.

Even this conflict availed little, given the U.S. State Department’s ultimate decision not to deem Iraq a CPC.

Are the USCIRF findings underreported because the commission is largely symbolic, or is the commission largely symbolic because its findings are underreported?

Iraq is now far more Muslim than it was before the 2003 invasion. For all the happy stories about Iraqi families resettling in Western lands, those who drove them out and those who failed to protect them ought not escape attention.

Feser on Teleology and Design

Philosopher Ed Feser over at What's Wrong with the World is tearing into the intellectual shortcomings of certain atheist books.

Asked about the distinction between Paley's design argument and St. Thomas Aquinas' Fifth Way, he obligingly answered:

Teleology can be either inherent in the nature of a thing (as an acorn has an inherent tendency to become an oak) or imposed from outside (as the materials that make up a coffee machine have no inherent tendency at all to make coffee, but must be forced to do so by an artisan). The former, immanent sort of teleology is what Aristotelians mean by final cause, and what Aquinas is interested in in the Fifth Way. When one denies final causes, the only sort of teleology left is the latter, extrinsic sort, which is what Paley is interested in. Hence the design argument's tendency to characterize the world as a machine or artifact.

For Aquinas, by contrast, final causality is evident in nature precisely insofar as it is not like an artifact[bold mine -kjj]. This is also why complexity matters so much to design argument defenders but not to Aquinas: Artifact-like objects can seem impossible to account for in terms of impersonal processes only to the extent that they are so intricate that their resulting from such processes is improbable. For Aquinas, by contrast, even something extremely simple like a match's tendency always to generate heat and flame specifically, unless impeded from outside, is an unmistakable mark of final causality. And for this reason, finality exists wherever regular causal patterns do (which is of course everywhere in nature, down to the level of basic physics); complex biological phenomena are not particularly important for the argument, being just one, fairly uncommon instance of final causality among others.

(Contrary to a common misconception, final cause is NOT equivalent to "function" in the biological sense; such functions are just one special case of a more general phenomenon. What is essential to final causes is just directedness towards an end, something evident in every regular causal relation, however simple. For Thomists, the main reason to believe in final causality is that without it efficient causality of any sort becomes unintelligible, thus opening the way to e.g. the standard Humean puzzles. All of this is explained in detail in [Feser's book] The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism.)

Feser points out the simplicity St. Thomas can see in nature. While Paley cites the designedness of a complex watch as evidence, St. Thomas' Fifth Way may cite any pattern. He uses the image of an archer guiding an arrow, but only by way of analogy.

Those of us still under the influence of mechanistic physics may hope that Feser's book further addresses how teleology still is observable in nature.

Upcoming poetry and politics events around Denver

America's Future Foundation's Denver affiliate is sponsoring a panel discussion on the topic Is Capitalism Dead?.

Panelists include Conor Friedersdorf, of the late Culture11, Gene Healy of the Cato Institute and Ross Kaminsky.

The discussion will begin at 7 pm at the Denver Art Museum on March 26, after an hour of drinks. I have yet to attend an AFF event.

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Also on March 26, novelist and Catholic deacon Ron Hansen will speak at Regis University on the Catholic literary imagination. Details are incomplete, but apparently the lecture begins at 7 pm. I would guess it takes place in the Science Building's amphitheater.

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After a hiatus of one year, the Denver Gerard Manley Hopkins Conference returns to Regis University this March 27 – 29.

(UPDATE)

The schedule is now available here, with more information available here. The poet's collected works are reproduced here.

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On April 3 at 7 pm libertarian writer Thomas E. Woods will be speaking at CU-Boulder. Details here

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And let's not forget the Thomas Aquinas Center's upcoming lectures on the CU-Boulder campus.

Prof. Janet Smith's April 6 talk is titled "The Sexual Mess That We Are In and How We Got Here."

Prof. Christopher Tollefsen, co-author with Robert P. George of _Embryo: A Defense of Human Life_, will speak on April 23. His lecture is "Embryo-Destructive Research and Abortion: Are They Different Moral Issues?"

Archbishop Chaput's sober reckoning of U.S. Catholicism

Today in Detroit Archbishop Chaput attacked Catholics' indifferent complacency and warned Catholics not to delude ourselves about "what we have allowed ourselves to become."

"November showed us that 40 years of American Catholic complacency and poor formation are bearing exactly the fruit we should have expected," he began, continuing:

...too many Catholics just don’t really care. That’s the truth of it. If they cared, our political environment would be different. If 65 million Catholics really cared about their faith and cared about what it teaches, neither political party could ignore what we believe about justice for the poor, or the homeless, or immigrants, or the unborn child. If 65 million American Catholics really understood their faith, we wouldn’t need to waste each other’s time arguing about whether the legalized killing of an unborn child is somehow ‘balanced out’ or excused by three other good social policies.

Comforting statistics also should not cloud our vision:

We need to stop over-counting our numbers, our influence, our institutions and our resources, because they’re not real. We can’t talk about following St. Paul and converting our culture until we sober up and get honest about what we’ve allowed ourselves to become...

Referring to St. Paul's preaching before the Sophists of the Areopagus, he added:

When Catholics start leading their daily lives without a hunger for something higher than their own ambitions or appetites, or with the idea that they can create their own truth and then baptize it with an appeal to personal conscience, they become, in practice, agnostics in their personal lives, and Sophists in their public lives.

Archbishop Chaput also broke through the dodgy descriptor "post-Christian," calling apostasy by its real name:

"If Paul felt so fiercely compelled to preach the Gospel -- whether ‘timely [or] untimely’ -- to a pagan world, then how should we feel today, preaching the Gospel to an apostate world?”

Nonetheless, he counseled courage, saying: "Fear is the disease of our age."

Bracing.

Upcoming decades are likely going to be difficult for Catholic Christianity in the U.S. They will be even more difficult without clear recognition and repudiation of the apathy found among clergy and laity both.


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In related news, American Papist reports that the Archbishop in his comments encouraged his audience "write charitably" to the President of Notre Dame University to protest its invitation of President Obama to deliver its commencement address.

The wisdom of property

Many traditional conservative critiques of capitalist and business ideology emphasize that these encourage an amputated view of man, reducing him only to his desires and choices.

This reductionist ethos tends to cut off the individual from his family, his history, his country and even his God.

The same ethos has direct bearing on cultural conflicts surrounding sex and bioethics, where lifestyle individualism merges with consumerist demand to deny and to transgress the limits of bodily nature.

Yet the link to Liberal philosophy's view of property is rarely highlighted.

In this spirit, Villanova Prof. Mark Shiffman provides an excellent and concise critique of Lockean anthropology in his discussion of The Human Meaning of Property at Front Porch Republic.

According to Locke, our right to property derives from our investment of our labor to improve something that did not belong to another already (Second Treatise, chapter 5). This right includes property in our own person – our body and our mental faculties. Locke’s formulation of our relationship to ourselves in terms of labor-derived property hints at the view of the human person that underlies it, which is the reduction of the person ultimately to the will. For if it is our labor that makes our bodies our property, and the same goes for our minds, then what is the “self” that initiates and is responsible for this labor, if not the will that makes us stretch our limbs and direct our attention to what is around and inside us?

....The will places value on things, initiates the labor that improves their value, and shapes the way we think of them in terms of the right to exercise itself in their disposal. Locke’s examples, like Madison’s, emphasize agrarian property, but do so solely in terms of the prospect of infinitely increasing yields... The will imposes its limitless terms on the world, rather than recognizing natural limits to its satisfaction – except the limits that have to be observed and enforced by government to accommodate the existence of other wills seeking their own satisfactions. These latter limits, seen from the point of view of the person protected by them, are what we call “rights.” They are thus negative or prohibitive in character, grounded on the valuation imposed on the world by the individual will, and formulated so as to coordinate all the individual and conflicting wills that fall under one system of government and laws.

This “right” that precedes and legitimates government is natural in the sense that the passions of all human beings lead them to lay claim to it. If we take the will of the individual and extract what is universal in it (or sufficiently universal for practical purposes), this will provide us with the basis for elaborating a reliable system of rights, or a set of exemptions from interference that everyone can sign on to. Madison quite correctly asserts a reciprocal equivalence between property and rights. Unfortunately for his republican cause, this equivalence opens the door to the marketization of every aspect of life.

This habit of making the will foundational to man and to government ends up placing all choices beyond criticism, provided they do not conflict with other choices. Reason, one of man's mental faculties, is the "property," and thus the instrument, of the unquestioned will.

Such voluntarism calls into question the humanity of those who do not present obvious evidence for having wills, such as the brain-damaged and the unborn.

It also distorts the meaning of nature, seeing it not as good in itself, but only insofar as it is transformed into an expression of human will and the imperialist self.

Proposing a less willful view of property, Shiffman follows Richard Weaver:

The responsibility for property that is intimately connected to our life as a person (and this is the meaning of proprietas: what is one’s own and characteristic of oneself) calls upon virtues that render us more complete human beings. Foremost among these virtues is practical judgment, informed by long-term views of our life as a whole and our relationship to our community. Thus only property that satisfies this criterion falls under “metaphysical right,” i.e. must be recognized as rightly belonging to our very being and its fulfillment as what it most truly is.

While I would scrutinize the place of practical judgment as a foremost virtue, his essay brings to the fore the distinction between property as an instrument to satisfying human desires and property as an instrument to advancing human goods. Even the "instrument" takes on different connotations depending on its object: is property best used "to the extent desired" or used "to the extent it is beneficial"?

For advancing the wisdom of property, Shiffman's essay may be used to benefit.

The Natl. Review Board’s clerical sexual abuse reports: behind the press releases

The U.S. Catholic bishops' publication of the 2008 Annual Report on the Implementation of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People presents the opportunity to compare the U.S. bishops’ press releases on the two most recent reports and to consider how they summarize the original reports.

Examination reveals an increase in the number of allegations concerning abuse of those under 10, while the disproportionate percentage of male victims is cloaked by the summaries’ word choices.

Additionally, the reportage of financial costs of sexual abuse settlements leaves out legal fees and other expenses, which can total more than 10 percent of the reported several-hundred million dollar settlement figures.

The press release on the 2007 report was published in March 2008, while the release on the 2008 report was released in March 2009. For clarity’s sake, I will distinguish the press releases according to the year of the report each covers rather than the year each press release was published.

The reports themselves use data from the Georgetown University-based Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA).

From the press release on the year 2007 report:

The CARA survey, to which 194 of the 195 dioceses responded, found five credible accusations of abuse that occurred in 2007 to persons who were minors in that year. Overall, CARA reported that in 2007 more old cases came to light as 689 victims made 691 allegations against 491 offenders. Most incidents took place decades ago, most frequently in the 1970-79 period. Most victims were male and more than half between the ages of 10 and 14 when the abuse began.

According to the press release on the year 2008 report:

Last year, dioceses received ten new credible allegations of abuse to a person still under 18 years of age. CARA reported that in 2008, more old cases came to light as 620 victims made 625 allegations against 423 offenders. Most incidents took place decades ago, most frequently in the 1970-74 period. Most victims were male and a little more than half were between the ages of 10 and 14 when the abuse began. About 23 percent were younger than age 10.

Note how the “1970-79” becomes “1970-74” in the more recent report.

In 2007, 105 allegations were made against diocesan clergy concerning the 1970-74 period, while 93 were made concerning the period of 1975-79. In 2008, these numbers were 108 and 85 respectively.

The press releases correctly describe these periods as the peak years in diocesan and eparchial abuse allegations, but they exclude religious institutes from consideration. In 2007, allegations peaked at 19 in 1970-74 and then 16 in 1975-79. In 2008, allegations concerning religious institutes spiked to 47 in 1965-69 before dropping to 21 in 1970-74 and 11 in 1975-79.

It’s curious that the press release for the 2008 report states the percentage of alleged diocesan and eparchial clerical abuse victims under ten (23 percent) while the version for the 2007 report does not. According to the 2007 report, the percentage of under-10 victims was 14 percent, meaning that the number of reported under-10 victims has increased.

Many editorial decisions are made on the fly and can’t bear much demand for consistency. More concerning are the data obscured by language choice.

Take the press releases’ “most victims were male” comments. In the 2007 report, “most” means 82 percent of diocesan and eparchial allegations. In the 2008 report, “most” means 84 percent of such allegations.

In these instances, male victims compose a supermajority. Yet in common speech, “most” means an unspecific “more than half.”

Alleged victims of religious institutes are slightly less disproportionately male, composing 78 percent of all new allegations in 2007 but falling to 67 percent of all new allegations in 2008.

The accounts of the financial costs also bear closer scrutiny. The reports themselves distinguish between the expenses of diocese and eparchies, on the one hand, and religious institutes on the other. Expenses are categorized according to settlements, attorneys’ fees, therapy for victims, “support for offenders” and “other costs.”

A total combining the expenses of dioceses, eparches and religious institutes is presented in the reports, but not always in the press releases. These various figures can easily confuse. (The Catholic News Agency story on the report authored by me in 2008 at one point mixed up total figures and settlement totals.)

Concerning financial expenses, the statement on the 2007 report says:

“The total allegation-related expenditures by dioceses, eparchies, and clerical and mixed religious institutes increased by 54 percent between 2006 and 2007,” CARA reported. There was “a near-doubling (90 percent increase) in the amount paid for settlements in 2007,” CARA reported. Dioceses paid $420,385,135 in settlements and religious orders paid another $105,841,148. Not all money that courts awarded in 2007 was slated for distribution that year and some money was paid out by insurance companies.

The 2007 report itself reveals that the figure of $420 million in settlements from dioceses and eparchies does not include about $53.4 million in attorney’s fees, $7.2 million for therapy for victims, $13.3 million for support for offenders, and $4.3 million in “other costs.” In total, clerical sexual abuse cost the Catholic dioceses and eparchies in the U.S. $498 million in 2007, half a billion dollars.

Figures for the religious institutes are significant here, costing $105.8 million in settlements, $7 million in attorneys’ fees, $2.1 million in support for offenders, and less than $1 million each in therapy for victims and “other costs.”

The combined 2007 cost to dioceses, eparchies and religious institutes was $615 million.

Here is the U.S. bishops’ press release on the 2008 report:

"The total allegation-related expenditures by dioceses, eparchies, and clerical and mixed religious institutes decreased by 29 percent between 2007and 2008" after increasing in each of the previous three years)," CARA reported. Dioceses, eparchies and religious institutes paid a total of $374,408,554 in settlements.

Not considering religious institutes, the Catholic dioceses and eparchies paid $324.2 million in settlements in 2008. But again, this figure excludes attorney’s fees ($29.6 million), therapy for victims ($7.1 million), support for offenders ($11.6 million) and other costs ($3.8 million). This totals $376.2 million.

Religious institutes paid a total of $59.9 million: $50.2 million in settlements, $5.9 million in legal fees, $2.6 million in support for offenders, and less than a million each for therapy for victims and other costs.

The combined total 2008 cost for clerical sexual abuse thus comes to $436.1 million.

Both the 2007 and 2008 combined totals exclude child protection efforts, which cost $22.2 million in 2007 and $24.6 million in 2008. The most recent U.S. bishops’ press release highlights this “increased spending.”

It’s important not to be too conspiratorial in seeing deliberate design in the press release discrepancies. The U.S. bishops’ press releases use boilerplate and, though that may seem odd to the layman, this is a common and reasonable timesaving practice among busy spokesmen and public relations writers.

There is also the question of the U.S. bishops’ responsibility for religious institutes. The statistics for such organizations may be underreported precisely because the writers of the press releases are working for the U.S. bishops, whose oversight of religious institutes is indirect at most.

However, awareness of these habits should drive journalists of the Catholic and secular media to examine the source documents and to rely on these, not the press releases, for their stories. When patterns in sexual abuse and the millions of dollars in legal fees are not noted, the extent of the damage continues to be unrealized.

‘Jesus People’ gives Christian music the ‘Spinal Tap’ treatment

The foibles and flaws of Evangelical Christian subculture are hard to miss in the art it produces. Its movies are often forgettable dramas marred by trite plots, two-dimensional characters and unearned moralism. Its contemporary music is often derivative in all the wrong ways, following rather than forging musical styles while writing lyrics which depict the Savior as an object of a high school crush.

Corrupting so many of these attempts at art-making is the spirit-killing willingness of aspiring Christian artists to substitute piety for talent and solid morals for long-practiced craft.

The Christian marketing industry amplifies this failure. Its promoters trumpet how the latest album release will lift one’s soul and how the latest movie will save hundreds of marriages, if not the nation itself. D-list celebrities and almost-famous pastors are sought for endorsements, while the bad art sold deadens its patrons to true beauty and perhaps even true religion.

As Hank Hill observed, these efforts do not make Christianity better, but rather make movies and music much, much worse.

“Jesus People,” the product of Hollywood Christians, aspires to exploit this parody-ripe phenomenon.

Available in several webisodes and an upcoming full-length movie, “Jesus People” follows the Evangelical habit of aping successful moviemaking.

But in this case, “Jesus People” apes the mockumentarian spirit pioneered by “This is Spinal Tap.”

The series’ initial webisodes follow the new Christian band “Cross my Heart” and its four members: the once disgraced Christian pop music star, the self-righteous young prig, the token black singer who conceals his “impure” past, and the novice Christian woman who has cracked open more beer bottles than Bibles.

The band is produced by a portly megachurch pastor reminiscent of a goateed Rick Warren. He has already entered the culture industry with his book “The Jesus Diet.”

Even for viewers like me who are outside the borders of Evangelical subculture, the real life targets of satire are recognizable enough: the shriveled first idea of a brainstorm session being treated as divine inspiration; the friends of the pastor being allowed to inflict their ramshackle production values on the untested band and the uncaring world; the twin goals of evangelization and mass marketing fusing in a dumbfounding chimera of good intentions and crud.

Some endearing brief subtleties also make “Jesus People” worthwhile, such as the pastor’s enthusiastic admiration for U2’s Bono, a sly reference to the clichéd “wheat field at harvest time” imagery of Christian music videos and a “famous Christian” author’s desperate poorly-concealed attempt to sell her book to the camera.

While the film displays a judicious cynicism, its actors ably convey that earnestness which makes for horrible art but also powers sincere contrition, prayer and charity.

The webisodes of “Jesus People” climax with this music video. As you watch it, know that it is preceded by an enjoyable backstory:



The dance pop tune is catchy, like some of Spinal Tap’s songs. The lyrical and visual satire, I think, effectively balance absurdity and realism.

Many Hollywood efforts at religious satire try to make Christians look ridiculous by ridiculing Christianity, or rather the filmmakers’ juvenile interpretation thereof.

This tired approach often directs scorn towards God Himself, driving away the religious audience while cultivating the superficial habits of sneering atheists.

These secular efforts often fail artistically precisely because they miss the human target, and thus the joke. Their comic effect, such as it is, lies in grass-fleshed man’s presumption to stand in judgment over the Almighty.

The strength of “Jesus People” is that it knows Christians are ridiculous and therefore revels in the phenomenon, believing that even laughable failures can be redeemed.

Watch the first webisode:



The series refines itself through its short run of perhaps 50 minutes. Its professional depiction of unprofessional art bodes well for the full-length movie.

The very novelty of a well-made Christian mockumentary likely covers a few of its flaws. The judgmental band member cannot escape comparisons to The Office’s Dwight Schrute. The music video’s style appears stuck in the early nineties, though that feature may be true to life. The Rapture may even be sacrosanct for those who believe in it, undercutting any claim that the movie’s satire is salutary and not scoffing.

Inevitable comparisons with “This Is Spinal Tap” also make “Jesus People” seem opportunistic. While Rob Reiner’s movie assailed drug-addled and obliviously egoistic rock superstars, this film targets the amateurs.

In the age of blogging and YouTube, amateurism is omnipresent and entirely excusable. As the webisodes progress, the filmmakers’ professional attack on unprofessional artists appears more and more unchivalrous, like an expert theater critic sniping at a high school musical production.

Though accusations of elitism are lazily thrown about, it is hard not to sense snobbery in elements of “Jesus People.”

Every artist starts out horrid. Lacking the lucre and pride of superstardom, “Cross my Heart” is just another megachurch band. A too-critical spirit of these aspirants may actually prevent great art from emerging.

Fortunately, it appears this concerns will be alleviated in the full length movie. It reportedly will flash forward two years into the band’s career after it has achieved stardom and expert ludicrousness.

In classic dramatic theory, the comedy is about the restoration of right order. Despite the flaws of its heroes and the deviousness of its villains, at its conclusion a comedy’s characters and audience react with surprised wonder, silently asking each other “How did that happen?”

Despite having no heroes or villains, “Jesus People” will leave its audience with similar smiling questions. The first puzzle is how Christian artistic endeavors could fail so epically with such great material. The second puzzle is how Christianity could possibly succeed despite the worst efforts of Christians.

A third question is how such a promising Christian satire like “Jesus People” could have taken so long to arrive. We may hope its debut marks the progress of Evangelical culture and American moviemaking to a happy place where prayer and satire kiss.


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By way of Barb Nicolosi, we find that Christianity Today, always eager to flog the shortcomings of Evangelical culture, also reviews the film as The Christian Spinal Tap.

Besides YouTube, the series is available at Blip.TV. The web site of the full film, which includes a trailer, is at JesusPeopleFilm.com.

As a final comment, I doubt whether a similar satire could be done about U.S. Catholic culture. There is so much variety in American Catholicism that the common references necessary for humor are lacking.

Alt. conservatism for the front porch

The aftermath of the Bush Administration has exposed for embarrassment and grief the various problems of movement conservatism. Its substitution of fear and ideology for prudence, its facile sloganeering, and its herd-like antipathy towards self-criticism have left thousands of Americans and foreigners dead or in penurious exile.

In a different and so far lesser disaster, these failings helped bring President Obama to power.

On the national scene, both the political and pontificating efforts of conservatives have further empowered the people and forces inimical to much that they hold dear.

Those skeptical conservatives who remained aloof from Republican politics perhaps now have their chance to be heard. Anyone puzzled at the rout of Republicans should give them consideration.

These "alternative conservatives" now have a new group blog at Front Porch Republic.

Patrick Deneen, Daniel Larison, Jeremy Beer and Caleb Stegall join several other writers who are convinced that "scale, place, self-government, sustainability, limits, and variety are key terms with which any fruitful debate about our corporate future must contend."

The economic crisis, they say,

...threatens to worsen the political and economic centralization and atomization that have accompanied the century-long unholy marriage between consumer capitalism and the modern bureaucratic state. We live in a world characterized by a flattened culture and increasingly meaningless freedoms. Little regard is paid to the necessity for those overlapping local and regional groups, communities, and associations that provide a matrix for human flourishing. We’re in a bad way, and the spokesmen and spokeswomen of both our Left and our Right are, for the most part, seriously misguided in their attempts to provide diagnoses, let alone solutions.

The bi-partisan destructiveness wreaked by America's political and financial leadership would be less damaging, perhaps even impossible, were our communities not corroded by senseless individualism, consumption beyond our means, a prideful despite for natural limits, collective amnesia about our past, and a fading but potent and improvident optimism about our mock-heroic future.

Patrick Deneen helpfully summarizes front-porch republicanism:

Our States, not to mention our localities, are ever-less a kind of “porch,” that transition from the world of the home to the public realm of community and eventually State and nation. Instead, as wholly “private citizens” - or, to invoke the preferred term, “consumers” - accustomed to houses that are places of private retreat, we see only one public entity of significance - the national State - but find it difficult to see ourselves a part of it. We regard the State as a distant and mysterious entity, occupied either by our team or their team but in either event an organization so vast, complex and dizzying that we regard it as anything but the locus of our practice of shared self-governance. We are daily less a republic because we daily perceive less of what are common or public things - res publica. Without the literal spaces where we come to know what we have in common through speech, habit and memory, we regard politics as a competitive spectator sport and government as a distant imposition - but in any event, anything but self-rule.

Self-rule, as Deneen emphasizes, is a practice and not a theory. An exclusively intellectual approach will be useless in flushing out or reworking our cultural debris.

But after we have persistently followed our intellectual delusions to the brink of a minor catastrophe, these keen thinkers might just lead us back -- to the front porch.

Übermensch or Last Man?

"There are no facts, only interpretations."
   -Frederich Nietzsche, Notebooks


"There is no reality, only perception.

"Strategy: Identify the filters through which you view the world. Acknowledge your history without being controlled by it."
   -Dr. Phil McGraw, Life Law #6

Kissing Gandalf far more shameful than quoting Leviticus

With an easy victory last November, the Second Congressional District's Jared Polis became the first openly homosexual man to be elected to Congress after spending more than $5 million of his own money on his campaign.

In CD-2, which includes Boulder and surroundings, the election came down to the Democratic primary.

One Polis primary ad featured strange displays of pixelized public nudity.

Polis' oddities now continue on Twitter.

His January 20 posting reads: "I was kissed by Sir Ian McClellan today (on the lips), and our nation has a new President!"

That "on the lips" is simply too much information.

Apparently the liplock took place at the Human Rights Campaign Inaugural Ball. (CNN didn't report the lips part.)

The Democrats' indifference to public lewdness was also in evidence at the Inaugural Parade, where the Lesbian and Gay Band Association marched. The group, which probably took the place of some hopeful and more deserving high school band, is also to march in the notoriously perverse Southern Decadence Festival in long-suffering New Orleans.

The CNA story on the LGBA's participation in the Inaugural pulled its punches. Though reporting that a pornographer would recruit at the festival, CNA did not quote the cad's appeal on the festival's web site. "We're always looking for new talent!" he said.

The unfortunate pandering to homosexual constituencies was probably a factor when the group Progress Now chose to host Sen. Michael Bennet at Hamburger Mary's, a homosexual burger bar, after President Obama appeared in Denver to sign the stimulus package.

"They have fun things like drag-queen bingo on Tuesdays," one Hamburger Mary's customer told 9News.

This shameful embrace of deviance is all the more jarring when compared to the treatment of Colorado State Rep. Scott Renfroe (R-Greeley).

The blog Right Wing Watch indignantly summarizes Rep. Renfroe's speech against a bill that would include homosexual partners of state employees in health insurance coverage.

In the Bible, he said, "homosexuality is seen as a violation of this natural, created order and it is an offense to God, the Creator, who created men and women, male and female, for procreation."

He then quoted Leviticus 18:22, "You shall not lie with a man as one lies with a female, it is an abomination,” and Leviticus 20:13, “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act and they shall surely be put to death. Their blood guiltiness is upon them.”

According to Right Wing Watch, he then rejected "laws that go against what Biblically we are supposed to stand for” and “taking sins and making them to be legally OK."

He continued:

I’m not saying [homosexuality] is the only sin that is out there. Obviously we have sin — we have murder, we have, we have all sorts of sin, we have adultery, and we don’t make laws making those legal, and we would never think to make murder legal. But what I’m saying that for is that all sin is equal. That sin there is as equal to any other sin that’s in the Bible, to having wandering eyes, to coveting your neighbor’s things. Whatever you do, that sin is equal and it can be forgiven because of that.

Illiterate leftists, libertines and atheists then jumped on this statement, claiming Rep. Renfroe "compares homosexuality to murder."

Actually, he was grouping homosexual acts among various other sins as a way of emphasizing solidarity among us sinners and our shared hopes for mercy.

It is easy for the superficial newsreader to join the initial condemnations of Renfroe without stopping to think how commonplace these remarks are.

Great rhetoric should not be expected from state representatives. In his simple appeal to Scripture, Rep. Renfroe is actually being quite representative of the many people who lack the ability or the desire to reshape themselves and their arguments into forms that would appeal to secular journalists, let alone whiny and censorious gay activists. They, too, deserve a voice in politics.

And Renfroe alludes to a deeper point that can be intellectually defended by those such as Colorado's own U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White.

Authoring the 1986 Supreme Court decision Bowers v. Hardwick, Justice White referred to American law's traditional proscription of homosexual acts. He wrote:

"Against this background, to claim that a right to engage in such conduct is 'deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition' or 'implicit in the concept of ordered liberty' is, at best, facetious."

Chief Justice Warren Burger concurred, writing:

As the Court notes... the proscriptions against sodomy have very "ancient roots." Decisions of individuals relating to homosexual conduct have been subject to state intervention throughout the history of Western civilization. Condemnation of those practices is firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards... To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.

Of course, as Rep. Renfroe has discovered, these licentious activists and their allies precisely intend to cast aside millennia of moral teaching. State recognition of such unions, even in a seemingly minor modification to insurance coverage, is part of this revolt.

Worse, it is unlikely that this revolt will merely overthrow convention. Activists with a Dracula-like aversion to the Scriptures will actively attempt to suppress their critics and the old order they so despise.

For instance, take Canadian pastor Stephen Boisson. In 2008 the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal ordered Boisson to cease publishing "disparaging remarks" about homosexuals and to pay $5,000 in damages for "pain and suffering" to the putative human rights activist who filed the complaint.

His so-called crime?

He wrote a letter to his local paper and had it published.

Expressing his "understanding, care, compassion and tolerance" for those with an "unwanted sexual identity crisis," he then condemned "the homosexual machine that has been mercilessly gaining ground in our society since the 1960s. I cannot pity you any longer and remain inactive. You have caused far too much damage."

Declaring a metaphorical "war" to "defend the precious sanctity of our innocent children and youth," he warned that children are being "strategically targeted" by ideologues and activists.

"Your children are being warped into believing that same-sex families are acceptable; that men kissing men is appropriate," he said.

In perhaps his most inflammatory comment, which still wasn't terribly extreme, Pastor Boisson called homosexual activists "perverse, self-centered and morally deprived individuals who are spreading their psychological disease into every area of our lives," comparing them to pedophiles, drug dealers and pimps.

He blamed these activists' success on apathy.

"How bad do things have to become before you will get involved?" he asked those who agree with him.

For this, of course, Pastor Boisson had to be destroyed.

And now people are lining up to make sure Rep. Renfroe and others join him in pariahville. Maybe you and I will be next on their hit list.

While the United States is blessed with protections for political speech stronger than Canada's, it is obvious that media and political leaders are eager to exploit any opportunity to silence their opponents with targeted social pressure.

Alas, some conservatives are playing a useful part in this strategy. Over at the blog Mount Virtus, Renfroe is mildly criticized for poorly choosing his rhetoric and context.

But this is to grant the radicals control over the terms of debate. Renfroe needs defenders more vigorous than his attackers.

At present, left-wing Democrats and cultural radicals are almost incapable of making any remarks that will generate media outrage on homosexual issues. Not because they are especially eloquent or wise, but rather because they have widened the range of discourse on the permissive side while shortening the range on the restrictive side.

The purpose of these Moments of Outrage is to trim the limits of acceptable opinion and to rope dull-witted conservatives and moderates into doing the trimming.

Then in a few more years, if the target is successfully silenced, it’s someone else’s turn to get trimmed.

"How bad do things have to get?" Pastor Boisson asked.

We now live in a nation where deviants parade for the president and Bible-quoters get berated.

That's bad enough.

A rabbi talks sense on ‘over-the-top’ reaction to Bishop Williamson

Any news watcher has noticed the tempest that has accompanied Pope Benedict XVI’s lifting of the excommunications upon the bishops of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) and the revelation that SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson made some foolish and inexcusable remarks that minimized the extent of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust.

The media firestorm consistently misrepresented the Vatican’s remission of the excommunications as a “reinstatement.” The breakaway prelates are not even heads of titular dioceses, offices which even the lowliest assistant bishop holds. The SSPX bishops are not yet in full obedience to the Pope and certainly need to clarify their adherence to the Second Vatican Council.

Yet despite the preliminary nature of the Pope’s decision, we are treated to stories about a no-name dissident theologian calling for Pope Benedict to step down, Jewish leaders wringing their hands about the future of Catholic-Jewish relations and Catholic U.S. House Democrats cluelessly and shamelessly voicing their “deep concerns” with the Pope’s decision to (there’s that word again) “reinstate” the wayward bishop.

“As such, we seek clarification on this important matter,” say members of the party unapologetically opposed to Catholic teaching on abortion.

To these almost automatic responses, Rabbi Irwin Kula, President of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York, has written a fine rebuke of similar “over-the-top” reactions.

His Washington Post/Newsweek essay “Jewish Reaction to Pope Disproportionate” describes SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson as “the sort of crabby, crotchety, trivial, unknown sort of jerk - the ratty uncle who embarrasses you every time he is in public -- who we all recognize exists in our communities.”

Rabbi Kula continues:

How is it that the view of some cranky bishop who has no power evokes calls of a crisis in Catholic - Jewish relations despite the revolutionary changes in Church teachings regarding Jews since Vatican II? Where is the "proportionality", where is the giving the benefit of the doubt - a central religious and spiritual imperative - in response to something that is admittedly upsetting but in the scheme of things is less than trivial especially given this Pope's historic visit to Auschwitz in which he unambiguously recognized the evil perpetrated upon Jews in the Holocaust and in his way "repented" for any contribution distorted Church teachings made to create the ground for such evil to erupt?

Something is off-kilter here. Is it possible that the leadership of Jewish defense agencies, people with the best of motivation who have historically done critical work in fighting anti-Semitism, have become so possessed by their roles as monitors of anti-Semitism, so haunted by unresolved fears, guilt, and even shame regarding the Holocaust, and perhaps so unconsciously driven by how these issues literally keep their institutions afloat, that they have become incapable of distinguishing between a bishop's ridiculous, loopy, discredited views about the Holocaust and a Church from the Pope down which has clearly and repeatedly recognized the evil done to Jews in the Holocaust and called for that evil to never be forgotten?

Echoing Cardinal O’Malley, the rabbi also criticizes the newfound enthusiasts for excommunication.

He asks: “And isn't it possible that bringing Richard Williamson back inside the Church may actually influence him to see how wrong he is on this issue given how clear the Church is regarding the Holocaust and its commitment to Catholic -Jewish relations?”

Still noting the “very raw and very vulnerable” attitudes towards the Holocaust in the Jewish community, Rabbi Kula then calls on the most hysteric commentators to acknowledge their overreaction.

For that he deserves praise.

Some writers, like Amy Welborn, Ross Douthat, and Sandro Magister have argued the media reaction shows the Vatican’s inability to anticipate and respond to the superficial and often hostile nature of the contemporary news cycle.

Improvements are always possible. The Vatican's unawareness of Williamson's kooky sides is difficult to understand, let alone excuse.

Yet we should remember it is not obvious which stories will produce hostility before the fact. Who could have predicted that the Pope's reference to a Byzantine emperor in a university speech would cause journalistic schadenfreude and Muslim outrage? Or that his brief pre-Christmas discussion of the created order and “gender ideology” would become the central grievance in a homosexualist media crusade?

The dullard’s opportunism in the press, especially concerning Catholicism, is perhaps too capricious even for an expert media relations firm. How can curia bureaucrats be expected to cope?

Next Gerard Manley Hopkins Conference: March 2009

After a hiatus of one year, the Denver Hopkins Conference returns to Regis University this March 27 – 29.

The conference schedule is here while More information here, while the poet's collected works are reproduced here.

His vivid "Pied Beauty" is a favorite I've committed to memory:

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

D'Souza vs. Hitchens: The not-that-great debate

Monday’s Religion vs Atheism debate by Dinesh D’Souza and Christopher Hitchens, summarized at Catholic News Agency, was generally uneventful. Few old arguments were punctured and few new debating points were posed.

While Hitchens brought greater charisma to the stage, neither disputant was a clear winner. By comparison, D’Souza roundly trounced evolutionary philosopher Daniel Dennett’s pathetic performance in their Tufts meeting.

D’Souza’s approach attempted to open minds of students. Rather than propose a full defense of Christianity, impossible in a short presentation, it merely urged “give Christianity a chance.”

While this method gives D’Souza less to defend, it also leaves him less to explain. His show of arguing only “on secular ground” was an unfortunate limit on the range of debate and discussion, but this limit may be the most realistic approach for addressing an unsympathetic audience.

D’Souza based too much of his argument on ethical appeal. He argued that Christianity brought to Western civilization concern about the individual and the equal dignity of women while laying the foundations necessary for scientific inquiry and the abolition of slavery.

But it is a distortion of Christianity to present it only as an ethical system or a worldview generator. D’Souza rarely mentioned the person of Jesus and his references to sin and salvation were oblique. While ethical excellence and sound worldviews are to be praised, D’Souza presented little for sinners.

Against D’Souza, Hitchens argued religion should by no means be given a chance. The prominent atheist made vigorous mention of the woes of human life, asking why God had apparently not intervened in the some hundred thousand years of pre-historic human misery.

Rather than acknowledge the problem of evil, D’Souza ventured the strange claim that Hitchens faces the difficulty of explaining why human civilization mushroomed in recent millennia, as if it were inspired by “some creature.” He mentioned the sudden sprouting of pyramids and cathedrals and iPhones.

While perhaps he was trying to indicate man’s oddness in relation to the rest of the universe, he did not elaborate this point in an enlightening way.

Conceivably, for D’Souza and many other Christians a technologically primitive but Christian society would be preferable to a technologically advanced but irreligious one. The world of early Scripture is pastoral, where cities are dubious locales and technological marvels, like the Tower of Babel, are a severe temptation to arrogance.

Christianity itself begins not with triumph, but with death and crucifixion followed by supernatural Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. D’Souza and Hitchens both focused more on the effects of Christianity rather than its content and its founder, though D’Souza tended to be worst in his priorities.

One of D’Souza’s bright spots came when explaining why Christianity should be preferred to Islam. The chasm between humanity and the divine, according to D’Souza’s one-minute sally, is attempted to be bridged in Islam or Judaism by building a “ladder” based on religious rules.

In Christian belief, this chasm is resolved by God entering the world through Jesus Christ. This Anselmian brief is exactly what many undergraduates need to hear.

Yet at this point Hitchens made an uncomprehending attempt to equate Mohammed and Jesus simply because they are both sent by God in their believers’ creeds.

Several times Hitchens tried to depict his own strawman misunderstandings of Christian theology as the fault of inconsistencies in Christianity itself. His awkward attempt to attribute to Pope Benedict XVI a strict interpretation of the doctrine “outside the Church no one is saved” met with loud objections from the audience, many of whom were less eager to damn than the Christian caricatures of primetime television are.

Other inconsistencies in Hitchens’ remarks are clear in retrospect. He loudly objected about totalitarianism being an inherent danger posed by religion and characterized divine order as the “celestial dictatorship.” Yet he also complained that the state of the universe meant a “very incompetent, very cruel” God was neglecting to intervene.

He also fretted that religion removes man’s responsibility for himself, but then complained that God did not take the place of someone sick or someone headed to jail.

While such objections are worthy of comment on their own, they easily contradict each other when presented in unison. The atheist can argue that God does too much, or that God does too little, but not both. A God more obviously active in the universe would likely draw Hitchens’ censure as an even more “dictatorial” deity.

Further, if human responsibility is so important, then God’s respect for human autonomy may be active even if it results in death and injustice across generations. The Christian doctrine of original sin, however controverted it is today, insists that our misery results from an ancestral act of sinful autonomy whose consequences are still visited upon us. Adam preferred disobedience to Paradise, and thus shattered our world.

Hitchens in various comments proposed a romantic individualism in which a person must strive to figure out morals and religion for himself. This position provides several practical problems, such as the lack of individual time, the lack of individual wisdom, and the necessity for a moral foundation on which to build. If each person must deduce morals on his own, then the overworked and the dull-witted are doomed to possess only a minimal ethic.

Some forms of individualism praise mountain-climbing while demanding each climber must invent his own tools, cobble his own boots, and discover his own mountain range. (The individualist often was born at high altitude, but acts like he is a native of the lowlands.)

Moral and intellectual dependence upon others cannot be a vice when they are such commonsense necessities.

At one point Hitchens betrayed a clear misunderstanding of narrative voice in Shakespeare. When D’Souza claimed Shakespeare’s moral universe was formed by Christianity, Hitchens recited one of the Bard’s despondent sonnets and asserted it as representative of the man himself.

During the debate D’Souza appealed to the reliability of the early Christian witnesses, arguing they would not have died for a falsehood. Hitchens mentioned Joseph Smith and Mohammed as obvious counterexamples where people died on behalf of liars or delusions.

However, pressed in the question and answer period, he clearly dodged the specifics of early Christianity, preferring to dismiss Christian reports that most of the apostles died in martyrdom. There is a notable difference between those willing to die because they trust a man who claims to be a prophet and those willing to die because they have witnessed in person the resurrected life of a man so obviously dead.

D’Souza closed by noting that he had first met Hitchens after the latter’s essay against abortion appeared in the left-wing magazine The Nation. Hitchens then explained it was “extraordinarily objectionable” to ignore our duties towards the unborn.
This small act of pro-life solidarity was a gift to observers who would otherwise never imagine anti-abortion sentiment among the non-religious.

The best part of the not-so-great debate was visible in the energy of the audience. Over 2,000 people watched the debate from the sold-out seats of CU-Boulder’s massive Macky Auditorium and they were often liberal with their laughter and applause.

Father Kevin Augustyn, pastor of the university parish St. Thomas Aquinas, provided a capable welcome to the audience and gave an overview of the Catholic synthesis of faith and reason. At the event’s close, he also noted that the campus ministry would hold three follow-up Q&A sessions on campus to continue discussion of the debate. (While the first was held Tuesday, the second will be held in Hellems 255 on Wednesday from 7-9 pm, while the third will be held in Hellems 253 on Thursday from 5-7 pm.)

Whoever proposed this follow-up program deserves much praise. So many people need an outlet for their concerns and questions after such an event.

Further speakers in the St. Thomas Aquinas Center’s Spring Lecture Series include Robert Louis Wilken who will lecture on St. Augustine on Feb. 20. Prof. Christopher Tollefsen, co-author of Embyro: a Defense of Human Life, will speak on embryo-destructive research and abortion on April 23.

The most telling phenomenon of the evening was its aftermath. Perhaps two hundred people were gathered in the auditorium’s lobby engaged in lively conversation about the event. After twenty minutes, security had to shoo the crowd into the cold winter night. While there may be a decline of intellectualism, it was not evident that night.

---

(As every non-profit leader must, Fr. Augustyn has appealed for financial partners and others to assist St. Thomas Aquinas Parish’s ministry to the campus. I repeat his appeal here, giving the program my full endorsement.)

(See also: Eugene McCarraher's review of Hitchens' God is Not Great: This book is not good)

The weakness of eugenics

With Gov. Sarah Palin’s entry on the national scene came increased national attention those with Down syndrome. Her infant son Trig, a human interest story in his own right, prompted several columnists to use his fame as an opportunity to reflect upon the place of the disabled in U.S. society.

Michael Gerson, for instance, produced Trig’s Breakthrough, a sympathetic piece lamenting the “eugenic abortion” of those sharing the child's genetic disorder. He argued our private decisions end “imperfect” lives in order to “remove the social, economic and emotional costs of their existence.”

“And this practice cannot be separated from the broader social treatment of people who have disabilities,” he continued.

“By eliminating less perfect humans, deformity and disability become more pronounced and less acceptable. Those who escape the net of screening are often viewed as mistakes or burdens. A tragic choice becomes a presumption – ‘Didn't you get an amnio?’ -- and then a prejudice. And this feeds a social Darwinism in which the stronger are regarded as better, the dependent are viewed as less valuable, and the weak must occasionally be culled.

Gerson praised Sen. Ted Kennedy’s co-sponsorship of a bill that would have required medical professionals to provide more information on the lives of those with Down syndrome.

But he then turned critical:

Yet the pro-choice radicalism held by Kennedy and many others -- the absolute elevation of individual autonomy over the rights of the weak -- has enabled the new eugenics. It has also created a moral conflict at the heart of the Democratic Party. If traditional Democratic ideology means anything, it is the assertion that America is a single moral community that includes everyone. How can this vision possibly be reconciled with the elimination of children with Down syndrome from American society? Are pro-choice Democrats really comfortable with this choice?

These are strong words that no self-described liberal can honestly avoid.

A similarly polemical 2007 Gerson column notes that James Watson was also happy to claim the Down’s syndrome child “has no future.”

Gerson rebukes this sentiment driving eugenic selection: “This kind of ‘choice’ is actually a form of absolute power of one generation over the next -- the power to forever define what is ‘normal,’ ‘straight’ and ‘beautiful’.”

His concern for the disabled and the otherwise abnormal is noble, but his analysis exaggerates the power of a single generation of mortals.

We find no exaggeration in Gerson’s belief that the advancement of eugenics “creates an inevitable tension within liberalism” because “the left in America positions itself as both the defender of egalitarianism and of unrestricted science.”

Gerson exhorts the left to “choose human equality over the pursuit of human perfection” and reject the Eugenics temptation.

But here his use of the language of liberalism misleads. Clearly perfection or its approximation should be preferred to equality much of the time. Accomplished performers in art, athletics, or science are to be applauded. Eugenicists exploit with ease this egalitarian unwillingness to make distinctions.

Gerson’s case would be complemented by the argument that spiritual perfection is preferable to so-called biological perfection. Better souls and better societies are formed through accommodating, and not eradicating, the weakest among us. The shunning of the disabled not only violates another person’s integrity; it mistakes physical flaws for moral flaws.

Such moral flaws were displayed in the writings of another Trig Palin commentator, Robert Tracinski, who profiled Gov. Palin at RealClearPolitics.com.

“The one clear indication we have as to the degree of [Palin’s] religious commitment is the fact that she is opposed to abortion in all cases,” he wrote. “…we know she means it because she chose to give birth to her youngest child even though she knew from genetic testing that it would have Down Syndrome, a severe form of mental retardation.”

From there Tracinski quickly descended into monstrosity. He added:

“This fact does reveal a profoundly faith-driven outlook, because it illuminates Palin's implicit attitude toward reason and the intellect. The joy of having a child is watching it grow and develop on its way to becoming an independent adult capable of enjoying a full human life. This is why parents rejoice in every new discovery the child makes along the way--his first steps, his first words, the first time he figures out how to open up and rifle through your filing cabinets while you're trying to work (but I digress). The tragedy of giving birth to a mentally disabled child is that he will never complete this journey. He will never become an independent adult or develop a full use of the faculty that is man's essential characteristic: his reasoning mind. To knowingly choose to bring such a child into the world is evidence that the precepts of her faith take precedence over the value of the mind in Palin's view of the world.”

Intelligent children often go through a phase in which they rage against the stupidity of humanity. Barring some mutation in conscience, they abandon this pose by late adolescence. By adulthood, they should realize it is not the innately dull-witted who deserve criticism and even contempt; rather, those most dangerous to the world are they who pride themselves on their own overestimated intelligence.

In other words, those like Tracinski.

In this case, Tracinski does not represent some declension of Democratic liberalism. He is the editor of the “Objectivist” Intellectual Activist.

His September 22 column on Sarah and Trig Palin marks his last appearance on RealClearPolitics.com. We may hope this is not a coincidence.

How will such a man react when he is robbed of clear thought by some disease or when he recognizes in himself the first signs of senility? With enraged mock-stoic suicide, perhaps, thus taking his distortion of man’s “essential characteristic” to one of its many fatal conclusions.

Let this be a memento mori: disdain for the weak ultimately results in self-hatred.

Hitchens and D'Souza to debate religion at CU-Boulder

CNA reports:

Two influential speakers will face off at the University of Colorado in a debate titled: "What’s so Great About God? – Atheism vs. Religion." The debate, organized by the school’s Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought, will feature Dinesh D’Souza and Christopher Hitchens presenting their cases for and against organized religion, its influence on world history and impact on current events.

The debate is scheduled to take place on Monday, January 26 at 7 p.m. at the University of Colorado – Boulder. Organizers are expecting a crowd of 2,000 to hear Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything; and Dinesh D'Souza, author of What's So Great About Christianity to debate the impact of religion on society.

Tickets are required and are available at Tickets West. For more information, see the sponsoring St. Thomas Aquinas Center, which hopes to fill CU-Boulder's massive Macky Auditorium.

"Atheism vs. Religion" isn't a promising subtitle. The varieties of religion are such that defining, let alone defending, the category is difficult.

These kinds of debates are best focused on specific religious traditions.


(To read my reaction to the debate, Click Here)

Apollo 8's 1968 Christmas Message

Forty years ago, broadcasting from lunar orbit, the astronauts William Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman read the first ten lines of Genesis in a live television broadcast.



Writing from the good Earth, forty years later, I too wish a Merry Christmas to you all!

Happy days ahead

Looking at my posting statistics, I was surprised to find that 2008 marks the least active year for Philokalia Republic since its first year in 2002. There are perhaps a dozen half-finished posts in the queue and perhaps five dozen blog comment debates I’ve started but never completed.

I thank my long-time readers for continuing to patronize this blog, and I assure newcomers that more productive days lay ahead.

For friends, acquaintances, and strangers curious about my situation, I offer the following explanation in a spirit more of bewildered amusement than of self-pity.

My surprise healing two years ago was followed by an intense ear infection, a bruised facial nerve from a foolish attempt at pain relief, a jaw cramp, and later a full body cramp following an unwise decision to ignore my stiff body’s warnings and push a stalled car.

Adequate attention from medical professionals probably would have addressed this problem. Unfortunately, my complaints were ignored, misunderstood, or dismissed.

One year ago I was quite optimistic. This was in part because even minor advances made me feel like normality was in reach.

Feeling like a character in a Far Side cartoon, I fear my guardian angel has been baiting the Almighty into pressing the Smite button.

As it is, I have been stretching to the point of distraction with little benefit for the past year. I have only received competent expert attention in the past two months.

However, the immense improvement in recent weeks has left me cursed with the hope that 2009 will be my year of return to full-time work. Yes, right when the economy has tanked.

So I ask for your prayers for the New Year, that I may be free from spite and from stiffness, and that a redemption may result from this persistent, if minor, cross.

And again, I thank you for reading.

'Critical Thinking' is making us stupid II

Perhaps R.R. Reno and Patrick Deneen have been reading each other.

In his November entry Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking Deneen echoes Reno's concerns about that educational buzzword and its admirers.

Likewise lamenting critical thinking's self-exemption from critique, he delivers a reflection on the "Canon Wars" of the 1980s:

...those debates have been decidedly won by the party that was ultimately devoted not to an alternative curriculum, but to its absence. What was sought was not the abandonment of certain books in favor of certain other books, but the abandonment of the idea that there were normative standards or moral lessons that could be drawn from books at all. What was sought was the defeat of the idea of education that involved moral formation based upon an inherited tradition discoverable by inquiry and reflection encouraged by the reading of great books, and instead its replacement by an ideal of a free-floating liberated “subject” who was capable of “thinking critically” about any and all subjects except the basic presuppositions of what constituted “critical thinking” and associated substantive commitments.

As I see it, both Deneen and Reno suggest critical thinking is the preferred educational method of a simplifying globalist or careerist ideology:

“Critical thinking” is a form of intentional deracination and displacement. Its basic assumption is that students enter college or university with a set of under-explored moral commitments that they have inherited from the broader culture...

The implicit opposite of “critical thinking” is faith, understood as an unreflective set of commitments to pre- or anti-rational beliefs. An education in critical thinking takes on the appearance of contentless inquiry, but is in fact deeply informed by a considerable set of Enlightenment beliefs, including the effort to inculcate deracinated reason, a conception of the individual as a monadic “self,” antipathy to culture and religion, philosophical skepticism, a deep-seated materialism, and a devotion to a cosmopolitan outlook that permits one to be comfortable everywhere and nowhere in particular.

[...]

The charge to engage in limitless and even promiscuous forms of critical thinking runs up against a basic feature and aim of Catholic teaching: that there is a limit on what can be critically regarded.

Deneen, a professor of political science at Georgetown, goes on to examine the effects of "critical thinking" on Catholic higher education and its relevance to debates on academic freedom.

He also suggests how the concept can be redeemed through its self-application in, and not against, the context of a vigorous Catholic education.


-------

For a less intellectual, more conspiracy-minded attack on critical thinking, there is Dealing with Resisters.

It is notable for its attacks on Rev. Rick Warren's Purpose-Driven Church:

Don’t minimize the significant parallel between the school [of critical thinking] and the purpose-driven church. The words and phrases used by the two systems may differ at times, but the manipulative management methods and change processes are the same. Both fit into the “seamless” structure of the global management system. Both would agree that it’s okay to criticize and tear down the old ways of thinking and believing. But it’s not okay to criticize the global vision for a utopian future or the march toward solidarity in a new world order.

In the selective portrayal of this site, Warren is a "change agent" who has traded Christianity for managerial techniques.

This critic has a point. What kind of preacher gives this kind of advice:

When a human body is out of balance we call that disease... Likewise, when the body of Christ becomes unbalanced, disease occurs... Health will occur only when everything is brought back into balance. The task of church leadership is to discover and remove growth-restricting diseases and barriers so that natural, normal growth can occur.

Church growth advocates are indeed paralleling the personal growth advocates we see in education schools and daytime talk shows, not to mention the financial advice columns.

Behind all this "critical thinking" does there lurk the malign influence of the MBA?

'Critical Thinking' is making us stupid

Back in September, Creighton University’s Prof. R.R. Reno lectured at the University of Colorado at Boulder, discussing how “critical thinking” can actually corrupt intellectual life.

Of course, this is counterintuitive on its face. What intelligent person doesn’t want to be a critic in some area of expertise?

But Reno, with depth and insight, subjected critical thinking itself to criticism.

He began his lecture by asking whether relativism is truly an affliction of academic life. Obviously not all standards are rejected. Excellence in sports and a modicum of ethical standards are widely acknowledged among all. The faculty judge and rank both students and peers by the standards of their specialty.

Yet these standards are not shared between disciplines. In part, this is because few generalists are capable of truly inter-disciplinary work. Further, the standards of one field of inquiry by nature cannot be the same in another.

This lack of communication helps to fracture intellectual life. This sometimes results in relativism, and other times in scientism.

In Reno’s telling, scientism is the order of the day. While the methods of science are fantastically powerful within its own domain, mistaken efforts at duplicating its success in other fields results in the decline of wisdom and any other integrating intellectual force.

One specialty of scientific reasoning is analysis—which we should remember literally means “breaking-up.” In applied science, nature is analyzed in order to be manipulated for the advancement of both research and economic profit.

“Critical thinking,” in Reno’s understanding, treats societies, persons and artistic works also as something to be analyzed and understood in terms of cultural, psychological, economic, and even biological processes. This places the student in a position of being a critical “master” of all cultures, rather than a participant in and beneficiary of a culture.

This position dovetails with globalist or careerist goals of emancipating people from economic poverty and common social restrictions by displacing indigenous cultures, including our own.

As Reno wrote in an earlier essay on the First Things web site:

"The basic existential thrust of postmodern cultural study is to relax the power of any particular culture over the minds of students. The goal is obvious. A Harvard man or woman is not to be a member of a culture. He or she navigates cultures. With a critical grasp of the factory of meaning, he or she sets about to oversee production...

“Will a person in a position of power who ‘reads’ his fellow man, rather than listening to what he actually says, end up manipulating rather than serving?"

(Worrisomely, this sounds like descriptions of President-elect Obama and many another politician: while appearing considerate towards an interlocutor’s objections, he will size her up and make conciliatory comments meant to please but also to silence, after which he will proceed to do what he already had planned.)

In his remarks at CU-Boulder, Reno said the poor state of critical thinking is a result of rejecting or twisting the virtue of docility, that is, the virtue of being easily taught.

If Reno’s critique is accurate, our system of education actually hinders people from being touched and enlightened by people, cultures, and works they wrongly presume already to understand.

While Churchill and Lincoln, to take two examples, are overly revered, too many students arrogantly act like the great men’s intellectual and political superiors simply because they can tell a story in which both figures are products of processes and biases beyond their own control.

This presumption extends to whole fields of academic study.

Under a malign form of critical thinking, ethics is re-envisioned as merely an evolutionary survival strategy, religion is discarded as a psychological eruption, and great art is sidelined as a product of oppressive, pre-critical societies.

For “critical thinking,” reverence is an obstacle to thinking. (Note the renaming of theology departments as departments of religious studies.)

Students of such a method, which is better called a style, find themselves sealed off from wisdom.

“Nearly two centuries ago, John Henry Newman saw that it was a conceit of the modern age that truth may be approached without homage,” Reno writes at First Things. “The mechanisms of critique destroy piety and in so doing diminish our capacity to love and obey truth once found. Moreover, as John Paul II pointed out again and again, responsible human freedom is not possible outside a more basic loyalty to the commands that can come to us only in and through culture.”

Can critical thinking be saved from itself? Perhaps not.

But the best form of inquiry begins with taking reality as a given, that is, as a gift. And as Hans Urs von Balthasar reminds us, one never receives a gift in a critical spirit.

Such an intellectual life is perhaps not an exercise in critical thinking, but so much the worse for critical thinking.

Docility in studies is far more compatible with thanksgiving, a word which some Christians will recognize in its Greek form: Eucharist.

In this confluence, we see how religion does not oppose but assists intellectual inquiry. Rightly practiced, the worshiper’s docile openness to God can reveal self, man and the world to him.

Recall Jesus’ words in John 8: “You shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free.”


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While Reno’s advocacy for reviving the virtue of docility is certainly necessary, there are a few curricular changes which may better instill and nourish rational capabilities in students than our present system does.

First, students should be educated in grammar and language to increase their ability to express themselves and to understand others. Second, they ought to be educated both in recognizing logical fallacies and in correcting or rejecting bad logic. Third, they should be schooled in making and analyzing arguments, instead of learning how to dissect societies which they cannot yet understand.

Students must abdicate any presumptive position as a “master of culture” and become students of an actual tradition, rather than devotees of a cultural analysis of that tradition.

By an unintended coincidence, these curricular recommendations mirror the Trivium of the early European university. But this allows us happy clarity about in which actual tradition students ought to receive their education.


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Reno’s CU-Boulder lecture was followed by some memorable interactions with the audience, a largely Catholic one which had gathered under the auspices of the Thomas Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought.

One young co-ed, self-professedly ill-equipped to wrestle with the content of his speech, asked Reno a general question about how students might bring passion to their indifferent campus.

“I think there is far too much passion as it is,” was the wry gist of Reno’s reply. “Aren’t you sick of people being in your face about everything?”

Another student question depicted the local Catholic parish as being a welcome outpost of certitude in the wilderness of college confusion. With gentle and sympathetic mockery, Reno rebuked this sentiment for its pretense.

Ridiculing the image of The Lone Torchbearer of Truth in a Cave of Darkness (while also confessing his desire to be such a torchbearer himself) Reno reminded the student questioner that he should acknowledge his own inner doubts and be wary of false certitude.

Reno brought students and others in the audience to recognize some flaws in the modern university while also guiding the youngest to shed their more naïve opinions. For an inaugural lecture, it is hard to ask more.

So Barack Obama calls up Gov. Blagojevich to ask him to spare the nation grief and step down.

“Yeah, I can resign…” the governor said. “But it’ll cost ya!”